My (honestly hardliner) view for a while has been that ads shouldn't exist. If a product was really good (and was in demand) a consumer would seek it out. This would entail the consumer knowing first the problem they want to solve, and then secondarily what the solution might look like, and once having found a few different products that satisfy their solution, carefully analysing each and working out which one they want.

Your idea of a directory neatly aligns with the way I view the market. Nobody should be putting an advertisement in front of people, they should be sought out when a need has to be met.

Not to mention the amount of environmental problems, human time and labour we could spare if our world wasn't oriented around fashions, trends, and attention harvesting.

I'm sure such a setup would probably devastate the world economy though, so obviously it'll never happen. We need everybody to be sat away designing, manufacturing, transporting and marketing junk to each other all the time. Sometimes the current adtech setup makes me imagine we're in the endgame, pretending that fad creams, supplements, gadgets and trinkets are somehow worth something, and therefore, so is all the advertising that is being used to sell it.

These are good effects, but they are not the only effects of an unregulated advertisement market optimizing for profit. In the current ad-tech market, the information is increasingly of the mis-information or dis-information type, and we have whole platforms whose central purpose is to attract the attention of people just to show them ads. None of that is good for anyone but the ad-tech companies, and this has to stop.

I know that a total ban is probably unrealistic, but we desperately need some kind of regulation which takes the advertisement distribution away from these companies and lets it be controlled by someone else, preferably non-profit organizations that actually optimize for maximizing the amount of useful and truthful information that is distributed to customers. Murdering Meta is a very happy side effect of that.